The paradox of race

In American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America, former Wall Street Journal columnist Leon E. Wynter (Crown, $25, 288 pages, ISBN 0609604899) makes a cogent case that consumer culture has radically changed the terms of racial discussion in America. Our identity is now transracial, based more on our spending habits than on our skin color. Part cultural history, part...

A radical's guide to change

Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change At Work by Debra E. Myerson is a timely account of the effect tempered radicals have on organizations. Who are tempered radicals? A few years ago, they were the people who encouraged women to seek positions in executive management and academic life and first recruited minorities for management training programs. Today, tempered...

What's your problem?

A recent article by Cullen Murphy in The Atlantic Monthly lamented the fate of common knowledge. In a technologically advanced society, he muses that we trade a broad understanding of arts, history and civics for a detailed understanding of the minutiae of obscure languages used to program Web sites. Instead of memorizing Rudyard Kipling's "If," students now commit to memory the URLs...